BOXX has announced their newest product, the “renderPRO” system (for Personal Rendering Option”). It’s a smallish box designed to sit on top of your existing workstation and provide remote rendering services.
renderPRO makes rendering personal. You don’t need a server room, IT personnel, or budget approval. Forget waiting on your workstation or standing in line for time on the studio render farm. renderPRO is quiet, compact, and fits on top of your workstation, at your desk, or anywhere with a network connection, so now you can render the images you’ve created right at your desk. renderPRO puts dedicated rendering at your fingertips and puts rendering decisions back in your hands.
For independent graphics artists, this might be a useful solution. Any larger user would go straight for the RenderBOXX solution and build a rack. The lowest configuration (the Pro4 with dual quad cores and 6G ram) is $2k, but the highest end (Pro12) runs all the way up to $10k.
An interesting option, for sure, but is it really useful? Would you rather buy one of these, or a full computer?
Why would you just not but another workstation??? Simple, every artist you speak to will tell you that every time they buy a workstation to help with rendering, they always find a way to use it as a creation station and it finds its way into the production pipeline. Another reason, this is a purpose build device designed just for rendering. It is compact, cool and quite. Looking at the already crowded workspace of the average artist, the last thing they need is more heat, noise and floor space taken up by another workstation. One more issue that some artist experience push back from their IT department as to why they would need an additional workstation. Most IT managers do not understand the complexity and the time it takes to render an image. By developing a solution to solve the rendering portion of the workflow, the artist will see little or no resistance from both the ID department and the CFO (or wife).